2048 Was A Ripoff Of Another Popular Game Called Threes, And The Developers Aren't Happy

Asher Vollmer is one of the developers behind Threes!
Asher Vollmer
Threes, one of the most popular and viral games on iPhone and Android, has spawned several copycat apps in recent weeks, and its developers don't seem happy about it.

Since the debut of Threes in early February, various mobile app stores have been filled with copycat apps based on the same premise of sliding numbered tiles around a board. 2048 is the most popular of the bunch, and it's currently at the top of the free apps list in Apple's App Store.

In a blog post published this week, the Threes developers addressed the recent trend of one popular game or app spawning a bunch of copycats and knockoffs. We most recently saw this happen with all those Flappy Bird clones after its developer pulled the game from the App Store.

There's a distinction too. Some of these apps are direct clones of the popular app, meaning a sketchy developer does his or her best to copy a game pixel for pixel. That doesn't seem to bother the Threes team as much, since it's usually pretty clear which app is the real thing.

What does bother them though are the ripoffs, or games that are similar to the original, but different enough to be called something else. For example, the Threes developers say 2048 appeared in the App Store just a few weeks after Threes made its debut, clearly trying to capitalize on the popularity of Threes.

To add insult to injury, many have accused the Threes developers of copying 2048, even though the Threes team launched its game first after a year of work.

Here's how the Threes team put it:

We want to celebrate iteration on our ideas and ideas in general. It's great. 2048 is a simpler, easier form of Threes that is worth investigation, but piling on top of us right when the majority of Threes players haven't had time to understand all we've done with our game's system and why we took 14 months to make it, well… that makes us sad.

In short, the Threes team isn't frustrated that its golden idea spawned a lot of copycats. They're more upset that Threes didn't get a chance to get popular enough before someone else swooped in to take its place.

The Rip-offs & Making Our Original Game

It's been a weird and awesome couple of months. Our expectations for our tiny game were well, fairly tiny. Basically, we hoped it'd do better than Puzzlejuice. It did. By a lot. It's still hard to address the world's response with something beyond a wide-eyed daze but essentially we couldn't be more thrilled. Duh.

But there's another side of that daze that we wish to talk about. The rip-offs.

With Greg being part of the Ridiculous Fishing team, we're not shy about calling a clone a clone, and believe us, there's no shortage of straight-up clones out there, especially on Android. But it's the not-really-clone sort of games, the rip-offs, that have popped up that have our feelings puzzled. We know how to deal with a clone, and likely, so do you.

First, it started on iOS with a game called 1024 released 21 days after Threes (February 27th). It's different, but not. The sliding is there, the doubling of cards, the merging, even the art is extremely similar. There are differences. New cards spawn all over the place. Swiping up, down, left or right moves the cards the full distance possible. There are "stones" in the grid that never move. This last feature was likely a choice the developer made based on the fact that the game was too easy. It's not very fun.

Next, came 2048 about ten days later. A game system identical to 1024 with one tweak, it removed the stones. Since, the game has grown in popularity after a posting on Hacker News on March 10th. It's freely available and open source, allows swipes so it can be played on the phone and has spawned many variants since, including our personal favorite: Numberwang 2048.

It's all in good fun, at least we'd like to think so, but try as our logical brains might, we still got the same "cloning feeling". Especially when people called Threes, a game we poured over for nearly a year and a half, a clone of 2048. Others rifled off that they thought 2048 was a better game than Threes. That all stung pretty bad. We know Threes is a better game, we spent over a year on it. And obviously, Threes is the reason 2048 exists.

But why is Threes better? It's better for us, for our goals. 2048 is a broken game. Something we noticed about this kind of system early on (that you'll see hidden in the emails below). We wanted players to be able to play Threes over many months, if not years. We both beat 2048 on our first tries. We'd wager most people that have been able to score a 768 or even a 384 in Threes would be able to do the same using the fabled "corner strategy". You probably could too! Just try tapping "up" then "right" in alternating order until you can't move. Then press left. You may not get to a 2048, but you might just see your highest score ever.

When an automated script that alternates pressing up and right and left every hundredth time can beat the game, then well, that's broken. Is Threes a better game? We think so. To this day, only about 6 people in the world have ever seen a 6144 and nobody in the world has yet to "beat" Threes. But that's what's better to us as game designers. We worked really hard to create a simple game system with interesting complexity that you can play forever. You know, "simple to learn, impossible to master". That old chess-nut…

And it all happened so fast. Threes was cloned and beat to a different market within 6 days of release on iOS. 2048 isn't that clone. But it's sort of the Commander Keen to Super Mario Bros. situation. Imagine Tetris was released and then less than a month later (instead of years) Dr. Mario was released. Dr. Mario is a pretty great game by the way, so the comparison is a bit weird here. Hopefully you get the sentiment.

This sort of fast turnaround creates a lot of confusion and while it's exciting and somewhat inevitable, it doesn't make the aftermath easier to deal with as original creators. Maybe not a lot of people know Alexey Pajitnov made Tetris, but of those that care about that kind of thing, it's fairly obvious to everyone that Tetris came first. If you're aware of Dr. Mario, you're almost certainly aware that Tetris exists.

The branching of all these ideas can happen so fast nowadays that it seems tiny games like Threes are destined to be lost in the underbrush of copycats, me-toos and iterators. This fast, speed-up of technological and creative advances is the lay of the land here. That's life! That's how we get to where we're going. Standing on each others shoulders.

We want to celebrate iteration on our ideas and ideas in general. It's great. 2048 is a simpler, easier form of Threes that is worth investigation, but piling on top of us right when the majority of Threes players haven't had time to understand all we've done with our game's system and why we took 14 months to make it, well… that makes us sad.

It's complicated and hard to express these conflicting feelings but hopefully this is a start. We are so happy with Threes and how it has done and all the response. Seriously. And even writing this feels like we're whining about some sour grapes that we have no business feeling sour about. Like it's not ok to feel the way we do some of the time. But we do.

We do believe imitation is the greatest form of flattery, but ideally the imitation happens after we've had time to descend slowly from the peak -- not the moment we plant the flag.

It took awhile to climb this mountain, 14 months actually. So to "show our work", we're posting around 45,000 words that mark the trail we took. It's not every text, skype call or even every email in our big 500+ email thread. But it's the important stuff, and a lot of it was important to getting Threes out in the world.